A Los Altos teen is helping develop a protective mask for health-care workers to wear during the COVID-19 crisis.
Andrew Hartley, a junior at The King’s Academy, began working on the project when he got involved with Helpful Engineering in mid-March. Helpful Engineering is a volunteer nonprofit organization with members all over the world whose goal, according to its website, is “to provide an open-source platform for volunteers to design, source and execute projects that can help mitigate people’s suffering from the COVID-19 crisis.” Hartley said he heard about the organization through his internship at the robotics company OhmniLabs.
“When an opportunity opens up like this, I kinda just jump on it,” he said. “I love to do engineering and then also just help out. If you can see something that you can do, I’m going to do it.”
Hartley started off with designing and making a 3D-printed prototype of face shields. The initial design, he explained, was a headband with the plastic from a 2-liter soda bottle attached to it as a shield. He works with 18 printing farms across the country to send the prototypes to hospitals. Samples have so far been sent to several Kaiser Permanente medical centers in the Bay Area as well as facilities in Los Angeles, New York and Florida.
“Since (the hospitals) are in such desperate need, we give them a call and ask them if they want to take a look at our designs,” Hartley said.
He’s worked on three rounds of proposals for the face shields. The first version, which took approximately one week to make, was a 3D-printed frame with a laser cut face shield. Now, Hartley’s moving into a molding production. He’s made approximately 200 face shields and 50 face masks, and Project Engineering is producing 400,000 a day across the world.
He’s received feedback from the facilities to help improve the designs.
“We went through one revision because our first was a little too squishy, if that makes sense,” Hartley said. “So we made that revision and sent them out again.”
The teen became interested in engineering at a young age and would watch videos on the subject on YouTube. He said he’ll always remember this project, and his favorite part is seeing the responses from the hospitals.
“Seeing pictures of them with the masks that I made is pretty fulfilling,” Hartley said.
In addition to designing and making the masks, Hartley serves in a managerial role, which he considers the hardest part.
“It’s been a lot of Zoom calls with people,” he said. “I think I really learned how hard it is to organize people. I wasn’t really expecting that as being a big challenge.”
Another challenge: balancing the project with school.
Hartley works on the face masks on weekends, but during the rest of the week he remains focused on finding solutions to the challenges posed by the coronavirus. His internship at OhmniLabs involves making telepresence robots, which are robots with cameras, that are being sent to hospitals so patients can see their families since visitors are restricted during the pandemic.
